Process Monitor for Linux (Preview)

Process Monitor (Procmon) is a Linux reimagining of the classic Procmon tool from the Sysinternals suite of tools for Windows. Procmon provides a convenient and efficient way for Linux developers to trace the syscall activity on the system.

Installation & Usage

Requirements

• OS: Ubuntu 18.04 lts
• cmake >= 3.14 (build-time only)
• libsqlite3-dev >= 3.22 (build-time only)

Install Procmon

Checkout our install instructions for distribution specific steps to install Procmon.

Building Procmon from source

1. Install build dependencies

sudo apt-get -y install bison build-essential flex git libedit-dev \
  libllvm6.0 llvm-6.0-dev libclang-6.0-dev python zlib1g-dev libelf-dev

2. Build Procmon

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/Procmon-for-Linux
cd Procmon-for-Linux
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Building Procmon Packages

The distribution packages for Procmon for Linux are constructed utilizing cpack.

To build a deb package of Procmon on Ubuntu simply run:

cd build
cpack ..

Usage

Usage: procmon [OPTIONS]
   OPTIONS
      -h/--help                Prints this help screen
      -p/--pids                Comma separated list of process ids to monitor
      -e/--events              Comma separated list of system calls to monitor
      -c/--collect [FILEPATH]  Option to start Procmon in a headless mode
      -f/--file FILEPATH       Open a Procmon trace file

Examples

The following traces all processes and syscalls on the system

sudo procmon

The following traces processes with process id 10 and 20

sudo procmon -p 10,20

The following traces process 20 only syscalls read, write and openat

sudo procmon -p 20 -e read,write,openat

The following traces process 35 and opens Procmon in headless mode to output all captured events to file procmon.db

sudo procmon -p 35 -c procmon.db

The following opens a Procmon tracefile, procmon.db, within the Procmon TUI

sudo procmon -f procmon.db

Feedback

• Ask a question on Stack Overflow (tag with ProcmonForLinux)
• Request a new feature on GitHub
• Vote for popular feature requests
• File a bug in GitHub Issues

Contributing

If you are interested in fixing issues and contributing directly to the code base, please see the document How to Contribute, which covers the following:

• How to build and run from source
• The development workflow, including debugging and running tests
• Coding Guidelines
• Submitting pull requests

Please see also our Code of Conduct.

License

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Licensed under the MIT License.